Nitra Synagogue

The Nitra Synagogue, built in 1911 in a Moorish Revival style, stands on a side street near the Old Town as one of the few surviving remnants of Nitra's once-substantial Jewish community. The building's distinctive horseshoe arches and ornate facade make it unmissable even to someone who didn't know what it was.

The synagogue no longer functions as a place of worship and now serves as an exhibition space dedicated to the history of the Jewish community in Nitra and the broader Nitra region. The Holocaust exhibition inside is sobering and carefully presented. The building itself is worth seeing as an example of the eclectic historicist architecture popular among Central European Jewish communities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

things to do sight museum
A story
Before the Second World War, Nitra had a significant Jewish population of several thousand people, one of the oldest Jewish communities in Slovakia. The community was almost entirely destroyed during the Holocaust; most were deported in 1942 under the Slovak state's own deportation laws, among the first such deportations in occupied Europe. The synagogue today houses a permanent exhibition on the community that once filled these streets.